Attila:The Scourge of God

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Regarding the history of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, we know pretty well what happened, but not always why or how it happened. This requires the writer of historical fiction to flesh out the skeleton of available fact with speculation as to the motivation and personality traits of real persons. For example, we don’t know if Attila planned to build a ‘Greater Scythia’, as I have suggested. But it is at least arguable that he might have done. Great military leaders have tended to harbour ambitions beyond the mere acquisition of plunder and territory — Alexander and Napoleon, for instance.

Such creative guesswork aside, I have, except in a few instances, kept to the known historical facts as closely as possible. (The story of Attila and Aetius is so extraordinary and dramatic in itself that it needs little in the way of embellishment.) The exceptions are as follows. The Burgundians have been relocated to Savoy a few years before this actually happened. My character Constantius is a conflation of two real persons of that name. Even Gibbon admits that the two Constantii ‘from the similar events of their lives might have been easily confounded’; so I don’t feel too guilty about uniting them. I have made him the key figure in Chrysaphius’ plot to have Attila murdered, rather than Edecon or Bigilas (Vigilius), the two agents most closely involved in the conspiracy. Ambrosius’ meeting with Germanus is conjectural, but certainly within the bounds of possibility when the difficulty in precisely dating events in Britain for this period, is borne in mind. According to some scholars (Winbolt, Musset, et al.), Ambrosius was active in the early to mid-fifth century; others (e.g., Cleary) place him late in that century. Like Aetius, Ambrosius Aurelianus (sometimes given as Aurelius Ambrosius), who is thought to have come from a consular family, has earned the epithet ‘the last of the Romans’. The estimated date of Germanus’ second visit to Britain (440-44) virtually coincides with that for the third appeal for help to Aetius (445), permitting, I think, a fictional conjunction. Irnac I have presented as a child rather than the young man whom Priscus saw. And Daniel, Constantinople’s ‘pillar-saint’, I have placed on his column ten years before he first sat on it. In addition, I have made a few minor changes to topography: part of the necropolis of Tarquinii (the Etruscans’ southern capital) has been translated a hundred miles north — but still within Etruria — to the valley of the Garfagnana; in Gaius’ transit of the Black Forest I have telescoped one or two features (for instance, bringing the Triberg Falls a few miles further south), and have relocated the Himmelreich from the western to the eastern end of the Hollenthal. The above changes were made in the interests of dramatic emphasis or rounded storytelling, and on that count are hopefully excusable.

As for sources, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (still the most vivid and readable general account), E. A. Thompson’s A History of Attila and the Huns, and The Later Roman Empire by my old lecturer, A. H. M. Jones, were essential background reading. Of the many books kindly lent to me by my co-publisher Hugh Andrew, the following were especially valuable: Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity, a series of papers edited by John Drinkwater and Hugh Elton; The Early Germans by Malcolm Todd; Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity; The Germanic Invasions by Lucien Musset; and — a real treasure — The Rome that Did Not Fall by Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell. Some primary sources that I found extremely useful were: Notitia Dignitatum, a list of senior army and civil posts with units, for both halves of the empire, compiled c. 400; The Histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, which gives a marvellous picture of the late Roman world in the period just before that of my story; Ptolemy’s Geographia; and excerpts from the Byzantine History of Priscus of Panium, which includes an eye-witness account of the Eastern embassy’s visit to Attila’s court.

R. L.